Reluctant witnesses give detectives fits

The following bit of wisdom is brought to you by the Columbus police assault squad.

The following bit of wisdom is brought to you by the Columbus police assault squad.

If someone is shot on the dance floor of a packed nightclub, rest assured that every potential witness will have been in the bathroom when it happened.

This holds true even when the club's bathroom is no bigger than a telephone booth.

The lack of cooperation will extend to the guy bleeding on the floor.

"I don't want to do anything about it," he'll tell the detective asking about his willingness to prosecute.

When victims of gun violence don't survive, the men and women of the Columbus Police Division's homicide squad investigate the deaths. The job is high-profile and intense, with a 10-year average of 94 slayings annually.

Homicide detectives are expected to dig deeply and close cases.

So are the detectives on the assault squad, which investigates 15 times as many cases. They do what they can as fast as they can, because the next case is always just about to happen.

"It's kind of like a MASH unit," said Sgt. Christ Holzhauser, a former assault-squad supervisor who is now with the homicide unit.

As the parade of shootings, stabbings and beatings marches on, each detective serves as the primary officer on more than 100 cases a year, trying to solve them often with little or no help from the public. If the squad has a universal complaint, that would be it.

"I think our clearance rate is dropping because of the lack of cooperation," Kestner said. "It's always awesome working an 18-hour day and then having nobody want to file charges."

"We get a lot of gang-involved shootings, and, of course, they're never gonna talk to you," detective Delbert Chapman said. "There will be 50 people who witness a shooting, and they're all in the bathroom at the same time."

Ronda Siniff has spent five years on the assault squad.

"A lot of responses we have turn into nothing at all," she said. "You see a lot of people say they want to take care of it themselves."

Even residents of embattled neighborhoods who respect the police hesitate to get involved, said detective Aaron Mall. "The majority of people who live in those neighborhoods are good people, but they're scared."

Many of the cases, detectives acknowledge, involve victims who were behaving badly at the time they were felled by a gun, a knife or a baseball bat.

"Our victims are our suspects and vice versa," Mall said.

But each detective retains a mental list of victims who buck that trend. Children are hit in drive-bys, innocent bystanders stumble into gang feuds and relatives inadvertently pay for the misdeeds of their kin.

At her desk, detective Heather Collins perused Facebook postings by some of her suspects. In one image, a child who appears to be 2years old is holding a handgun.

"Aww, dhat baby a gangsta already!" someone had posted online.

"I don't think that people would believe what goes on in this city," Collins said.